Athens Journal of Philology
September 2015
‘The Sentence Cannot Hold’: Language and
Legality in Yusuf Atılgan's Anayurt Oteli
By Duygu Ergun
In this paper I will be tracing the concept of sentence in Yusuf Atılgan’s Anayurt Oteli
written in 1973, one of the most prominent examples of late modernist novels written in
Turkish. I aim to primarily look at the rhetorical use of everyday as well as legal language
in the narrative that marks the impossibility of agreement between the protagonist
Zebercet and his surroundings. Starting with the violent nature of language as means for
communication, I will delve into the limits of the expressive capacity of characters in the
novel. I also plan to inquire what ethical possibility the narrative might open up to its
reader by problematizing the understandability of ‘the other.’ I will argue that such an
ethical concern about ‘the other’ would, eventually, induce the reader to question the
‘binding’ nature of the everyday communication that was taken for granted up until
modernism.
Keywords: Yusuf Atılgan, Anayurt Oteli, Language, Legal Discourse, Rhetoric, Event,
Modernist Literature.
Introduction
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world (Yeats, 1931, p. 346)
William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” was published in 1920 in the
well-known American magazine called The Dial. The speaker in the poem employs a
variety of metaphorical expressions to brief its audience about the aftermath of World
War I: ‘things fall apart,’ ‘the ceremony of innocence is drowned’ and the so-called
unifying spirit of the world, a.k.a. ‘Spiritus Mundi’ now possesses ‘a gaze blank and
pitiless as the sun.’ The catastrophic atmosphere of the post-war Europe is depicted
through a description of an expanding, persistent, and ‘widening’ gyre, whose
destructive appearance seems to shatter any hope towards a harmony among people
that was presupposed up until modernity. As an outcome of this separating vortex, the
image of ‘falcon’ is irreversibly separated from ‘the falconer,’ and can no longer hear
its owner’s call: they have permanently lost track of each other. Overruling the belief
in the competency of communication, there can neither be any mediums through
which to share or disseminate ideas, nor any common ‘spirit,’ or consensus of any
sort, taking place within this imagined, post-apocalyptic society.
In line with this stream of thought, the idea of the ‘second coming,’ which is
supposed to bring about the eternal unity and mark the salvation of human kind, also
becomes hollowed out of any significance. The messianic narrative no longer sets up a
comprehensible past through the collectively shared story of Jesus or a preordained

M.A. Student, Boğaziçi University, Turkey.
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future that his anticipated return would launch. In other words, there can be no linear
conceptualization of history, and its beginning or end cannot be earmarked. The
second coming that is ‘hardly’ uttered by the speaker in the poem, thus, presents its
very incapability of establishing any agreement or order among people as their
communicational ground has been and will always fail to function. Hence, the failure
and the impossibility of the idea, which problematize the belief in unity after the war,
makes the reader doubt and question the accuracy of this shared narrative. Therefore,
portraying the revelation of the gyre as the consequence of the war, the poem not only
implies the possible disagreements that are likely to take place among people or
several states after the World War I; it also demonstrates the constant inadequacy of
communication, the impossibility of establishing any agreement with the other party
under any circumstances.
Before launching into a discussion on the aesthetic features of language in Yusuf
Atılgan’s novel Anayurt Oteli (1973), I preferred to start with a poem that expresses
disbelief in the power of communication. Considered as one of the most remarkable
modernist texts in literary criticism, “The Second Coming” concerns itself with the
limits of understanding, when people try to reach an agreement with ‘other’ members
of their society. Similarly, the ethical position of Anayurt Oteli is centered upon the
question of relating oneself to the uncompromising ‘other:’ how could one face or
relate to a person with whom one has nothing in common? Is it possible to
communicate, knowing the fact that the other party will never be fully understood?
Moreover, what triggers this desire to come to terms with ‘the other,’ and what
problems might arise in this process? These are the primary drivers behind the
appraisal of how personal relations are depicted in Anayurt Oteli – essentially a story
about ‘a community of those who have nothing in common’ (Lingis, 1994).
The novel tells the story of a young man named Zebercet, who runs a hotel called
Anayurt Oteli in a small town of Turkey. We learn that the hotel used to be an old
Ottoman residence legated by Zebercet’s grandfather. The narrator describes a host of
people from different backgrounds, who routinely check in and out of this hotel.
While everything proceeds as per usual, Zebercet’s life reaches to a turning point one
day, when he falls in love with a mysterious woman that checks into the hotel after her
train, arriving from Ankara, is delayed. He becomes gradually obsessed with this
woman. He starts by preserving her room exactly in the condition that she has left it
after she has checked out. Over time, his obsession grows stronger and takes over his
daily life. An orderly man of habit, he gives up much of his daily chores such as
waking up at six in the morning or shaving steadily three times a week; he shuts down
the hotel, walks around the streets aimlessly, attends cockfights in the neighborhood,
rapes and strangles the cleaning woman working at the hotel, goes to trials of murder
cases as a complete stranger, and in the end, commits suicide.
There seems to be no logical explanation, no chain of causality linking these
events to one another in the novel. Berna Moran’s (2011) comparative analysis on
Yusuf Atılgan’s Anayurt Oteli as well as Aylak Adam, another novel by Atılgan
(Atılgan, 1959), also emphasizes this anti-deterministic aspect of the narrative.
According to Moran, despite the similar themes and character traits, the main
distinction between Atılgan’s two novels is that Anayurt Oteli never reveals to the
reader the exact causes of incidents taking place in the plot (Moran, 2011, p. 293).
Indeed, throughout the narrative, the narrator leaves its narratee in the dark: it does not
explain the protagonist’s rationale behind his actions, which, in an upward spiral of
escalating intensity, range from seemingly ‘harmless’ and obsessive behaviors to the
acts of extreme violence such as rape and murder.
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The absence of a link of causality that should weave the narrative together
represents the ethical question of the novel: the insufficiency of communication with
the other. By disclosing a limited amount of information about Zebercet’s experience
and thought processes, the language of the narrative constantly maintains a distance
between the reader and the protagonist. Atılgan’s ‘refusal’ to render Zebercet more
‘understandable’ or ‘representable’ to its readership, at the same time, lays bare its
own incapability of telling his experience, as I will discuss more at length below.
Furthermore, not only does the narrator fall short of rendering Zebercet’s story; it also
demonstrates the communicational distance between the socially excluded protagonist
and his surroundings. Zebercet’s conversations with other characters conceal what
they actually think of each other; they employ only a very few words and expressions,
the scope of which remains confined to expressions of common courtesy or legal
parlance. Therefore, sentences considered from the eighteenth century onwards as the
appropriate medium of communication in society (Liftschitz, 2012) ‘cannot hold’ in
Anayurt Oteli. The characters’ thoughts and experiences cannot be effectively
articulated in everyday conversations in the narrative – which, in turn, makes the
reader question the problem concerning the knowledge of the encountered ‘other.’
How the narrator and characters make use of this ‘sentential,’ everyday language, and
how this underpins the ethical implications of the novel, is the issue I aim to explore in
this article.
‘Now What Is a Sentence’: Violence of the Everyday
While wandering in town one day, Zebercet decides to watch a traditional
cockfight. It turns out to be extremely bloody, wherein the cocks almost kill one
another. This, however, does not disturb the audience. The narrator describes this
violent scene in an apathetic tone by using short sentences, focusing merely on the
succession of events:
Nobody entered the arena. The fight went on. The cock with shorter
comb was not running. It fell down while trying to jump; it got up,
stumbled. It fell down again when the other cock hits two times with
its wings in the last minute; it craned and did not get up. It was lying
flat on the ground” (Atılgan, 2014, p. 49).1
Although the fight is recounted in immense detail, the narrator describes the
subjective experience of pain only in limited terms: the reader gets a sense of how
violently the fight is unfolding only through the description of the physical damage
one cock has inflicted upon its competitor. However, the narrator remains silent on
how much pain the cock must have felt – if any at all. The over-simplicity and
mundaneness of this everyday language fails to make the reader sympathize with the
other’s pain.
Ironically, the language in Anayurt Oteli always foregrounds the violence itself,
yet never narrates how it is experienced. It describes the physical reaction the
characters show to the pain, but never lets prevail the actual pathos they endure. As in
the quotation provided above, while the cock is dying, the narrator relegates its
1
Unless otherwise stated, the text accessed in the Turkish original has been translated by this
author for the purpose of this article.
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suffering to the sidelines, and instead focuses on reactions of the audience and
continues to comment on the fight. Surely, pain is always present in the text; however
its effects are not conveyed explicitly. Therefore, the reader can never relate to, or
connect with the experience of the characters; in other words, by relaying the events
one after another in a mechanized manner, the emotionless language of the novel
hinders the reader from identifying with any of the characters. In return, this
indifference makes violence unfold, and therefore, in a way, propagates it.
In his introduction to Veena Das’ Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into
the Ordinary (2007), Stanley Cavell touches upon the issue of believing in the ability
to understand the other’s pain, stating that it results from the very idea of skepticism in
Western thought. He states that the skeptic look realizing its inadequacy to know the
other ‘results not in a realization of [its] ignorance of the existence of the other, but in
[its] denial of that existence, [its] refusal to acknowledge it, [its] psychic annihilation
of the other’ (p. xiii). The narrator’s telling of the ordinary events in a simplistic
manner in Anayurt Oteli, therefore, not only hinders the reader from empathizing with
the characters’ experiences, but also refuses to portray the pain on purpose. By
escaping from the other’s pain through limiting its existence to the realm of
representation, the language serves itself as a testament to violence. Thus, the
linguistic expressions of the everyday life are not secure at all; they render the
‘unknown’ ordinary, and in turn, the ordinary becomes ‘hackneyed’ (Cavell, 1986).
Das also argues that the ‘unknowable’ pain of the other is, in fact, embedded within
these narratives on the ordinary – in the incapability of language that describes the
everyday violence (Das, 2007, p. 7). In line with this stream of thought, writing
appears here as an ethical question concerning the impossibility of telling about the
other’s singular, unique experience. Through her reading of Maurice Blanchot’s The
Writing of the Disaster (1986), Sara Ahmed asserts that the ethical dilemma of writing
is constructed through narrating the other’s experience without having any knowledge
on it. She maintains that writing essentially conveys the weakness of the self that
appears ‘tormented, vulnerable, and tired’ in the process of telling about the
unknowable ‘other’ (Ahmed, 2000, p. 137). Also in Anayurt Oteli, writing is an
intrinsically problematic action when the narrator deliberately refrains to give
information about the triggering reasons behind Zebercet’s behavior. Telling becomes
here both a possibility and an impossibility in the sense that the narrator places
himself/herself in a troubled position when trying to recount the story with his/her
sentences about the untold. Zebercet becomes himself a question of ‘the other,’ to
whom the narrator cannot give its audience any access to his experiences: ‘Zebercet: It
cannot be said that he is medium height; not short either. According to his military
service measures his height is hundred and sixty two centimeters, and his weight is
fifty-four’ (Atılgan, 1973, p. 12). This act of listing his physical features drawing on a
formal document shows the problematic aspect of defining another person according
to one’s observations. Zebercet will always remain reduced to sentences in the pursuit
of representing him accurately. Facing this dilemma of telling in the narrative through
the question of representation, the narrator is confronted with an intrinsic problem in
the act of writing itself: how to write?
Gertrude Stein, one of the most significant American writers of modernism,
discusses the functions of sentences used in writings as well as in everyday
conversations in How to Write: ‘[a] sentence is proper if they have more than they
could. They could. Without leaving it. A sentence makes not it told but it hold. A hold
is where they put things. Now what is a sentence. A sentence hopes that you are well
and happy’ (Stein, 1975, p. 29). For Stein, sentences are pleasing because of their
reconciliatory meanings. They carry definitive premises, and directly communicate the
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intended message. They, therefore, can provide specific answers to particular
questions; by reducing complex thoughts into a ‘hold,’ they ease the minds of those
privy to the conversation. They, therefore, provide a common ground for sharing
thoughts and experiences in a society. This very idea of ‘hold’ is also the reason why
Stein criticizes sentences of this sort: they grossly oversimplify, and thus gloss over
people’s differences by neglecting their unique experiences for the sake of appealing
to the so-called collective values of society, and therefore maintaining an easily
comprehensible form of ‘communication.’1 In this way, it becomes a legitimate
medium of speech, a sterile contract making things appear as reachable and
understandable. A thought and/or experience, it appears, could become
understandable, only if the mode of its delivery adheres to the rules of formal logic; in
return, what remains as different, obscure or ambiguous for their conventional,
everyday speech is left out.
Both Stein’s and Atılgan’s texts deal with concerns over the use of everyday
language problematized primarily in modernist literatures where the conceptualization
of ‘sentence’ is subjected to change. The specific use of language in Atılgan’s novel
invalidates the everyday language where the sentence, as also implied in Stein’s text,
becomes an instrument to violate the other’s presence rather than serving, as it should,
as a medium for agreement among people. The following passage shows one of the
rare moments when the reader encounters Zebercet’s thinking. The fact that he avoids
saying anything until it becomes necessary for him to talk to the man he accidently
hits, lays bare the violent power of the everyday conversations on the unique ways
Zebercet expresses his thoughts:
‘… I had thrown him thus falling out of the attic window into the
street in the following morning garbage man must have taken him
supposing that he was hit by a car what’s his name no name let’s call
him Karamık isn’t he this morning’s police coming now’
(When he turned back suddenly, he hit a man on the arm. ‘I beg your
pardon’ he said.) (Atılgan, 1973, p. 86).2
The reader comes into contact with his stream of consciousness until the moment
it is ruptured by Zebercet’s accidental hit. That he feels obligated to apologize to the
main prompts Zebercet to set his genuine thinking aside. Under the conditions imposed
by the formal rules of conventional phrases, he becomes unable to express his unique
thinking to others. Therefore, the moment Zebercet reacts to the man by saying ‘I beg
your pardon,’ an idiom used for common courtesy, the distance between him and the
man becomes absolute: this formal language, invoked in an everyday context, reveals
the communicational irreconcilableness between them. Everyday language fails to
convey Zebercet’s anxiety – which then becomes silenced under the reign of the
‘sentential’ propriety. Disregarding how Zebercet must have felt at that instance, as he
faces the man, the idiom ‘I beg your pardon’ reduced the unique features of his
singular experience to what is acceptable and easily comprehensible.
1
Also etymologically, the word ‘sentence’ stands for ‘opinion,’ ‘juridical decision’ or
‘proposition,’ (Weekley, 1921, p. 1314) and carries the meaning of ‘to pronounce judgment
on,’ and ‘to condemn’ (Davidson, 1909, p. 905). Judgment, in these definitions, becomes the
precondition of sentence giving definitive meanings to one’s actions. In Stein’s sense,
sentence’s capability to reduce one’s actions to its own rules, to its own law through judgment,
constitutes its violent power.
2
The translation is by Ezgi Ceylan.
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Nurdan Gürbilek’s reading of Zebercet’s phrase ‘I beg your pardon’ similarly
underlines Zebercet’s appearance in the narrative as ‘the docile other,’ who surrenders
to his ‘insurmountable destiny of being despised’ by people he comes across in his life
(Gürbilek, 2013, p. 152). Although he himself is a violent offender who rapes and kills,
the violence that is present in everyday life and forms his apathetic and troubled
identity, seems to be no less violent than his actions. Zebercet’s tragic position,
therefore, does not lie in his unusual state of mind; on the contrary, it stems from, and
is constructed from the smallest details of his ordinary life: the formal relationships he
has to build while running the hotel, the formalities of everyday conversations he has to
make with strangers, the right ways to apologize, to show gratitude, or to respond
properly. The tragic is then embedded within the very nature of roles one has to adopt
when trying to come into contact with others, or basically, to forge ahead with the
everyday life. Gürbilek, therefore, argues that ‘the main problem in Atılgan’s fictions is
the existence of other people’ (Gürbilek, 2013, p. 160) who perform those roles out of
their own volition, in order to impose their authority on others, like the two villagers
who break into the hotel and threaten Zebercet to look for the woman’s towel with
whom Zebercet is in love. One gets the sense that they take for granted the way they do
things, and they see no harm in inflicting pain on Zebercet, since they apply the basic,
‘conventional rules,’ by which they have been raised. In this respect, what is
considered ‘violent’, is determined by the principles of inclusion and exclusion
ingrained in the collective unconscious – the norms and traditions people have
developed, laws that they have formulated, as well as the ‘true’ history they believe in.
How then, are the formal and daily uses of ‘sentences’ invalidated in Anayurt
Oteli so that the narrative sets up its ethical stance concerning the impossibility of
representing the other within the language? I argued earlier that the daily use of
sentences does not foreground the singular experiences of the characters. However, the
norms that are followed by the rules of everyday discourse, becomes emptied by the
infusion of different uses of language in the narrative, and the idea of unity between the
parties of conversation is replaced by the idea of absolute separation and plurality.
Emmanuel Levinas also discusses the language’s potential to reveal the differences
between people and to bring forth the space where they, revealing their different
identities, can contest (Levinas, 2011, p. 195). The absolute difference is inconceivable
through formal logic, as it cannot be revealed within the conventional and
representational boundaries of sentence that ‘pleases by its sense.’ Anayurt Oteli breaks
the authority of sentence by laying bare its limits, by demonstrating the characters’
limited recognition of Zeberet as well as the narrator’s limited recounting of his
experiences. As Ülkü Onart (1978) argues in his narrative and discourse analysis of
Anayurt Oteli, the communicative agreements among the characters in the novel is
challenged by a variety of narrative techniques, such as the use of third-person narrator
focusing on Zebercet’s singular perspective, or the use of legal discourse dominating
other voices in the narrative. Contesting and limited discourses, perspectives, and uses
of language in the narrative imply the irreducible possibility of non-representable
identities of characters, despite their obligatory relations with society, with law, or with
others in the narrative.
Dealing with the contradictory nature of representation which sets the means as
well as the limits of telling about one’s story or experience, the language becomes of
vital importance concerning the ethical problem of knowing the other in the narrative.
The narrator, for instance, deliberately refrains from explaining the reasons behind
Zebercet’s actions by breaking the claims of any judgment on his behavior. By doing
so, the narrator preserves Zebercet’s identity without trying to break down any causal
relations of his conducts to the narratee. It refuses to become an intermediary who
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appears to know everything about Zebercet. The narrator’s position is significant in the
sense that it leaves the unknowable parts of Zebercet’s identity outside its claim. It
never tends to define more than it could by making the obscurity of characters in the
story apparent. However, its depictions remain always within the boundaries of its
limited knowledge about Zebercet. The following passage, for example, is taken from
the part in which Zebercet rapes the cleaning woman; the narrator recounts only what
can be observable without adding any judgment to the story it tells:
He approached the bed. Her head was inclined to the left; neck veins
were swollen. He put his hand beneath the pillow: she was there. He
pulled the quilt up to his tiptoe; up to the bedpost … He put his hand to
her leg, move it to the top; she was warm, his fingers wandered among
the hair, he grabbed and pulled. She moved. He lied next to her
unbuttoning her shirt; caressed her breasts: plump, firm
(Atılgan, 1973, p. 57).
How Zebercet’s actions are described are overly physical: the position and form
of the woman’s neck, the movements and warmth of her body, and the sensation
Zebercet feels in his fingers are depicted in the minutest detail. The narrator does not
take a single step beyond the purely descriptive writing of a rape scene. The sentences
relay factual information, without any recourse to describing any signs of emotion or
moral judgment. One hears the same, cold voice that recounts the story. Since it is
impossible to narrate any event in a subjective fashion, the narrator prefers describing
in the narrative what is observable and sensible.
Atılgan’s limited use of descriptive detail and emphasis on physical aspects of
scenes of violence and sexuality, also illuminates the ‘ungraspable experience’ of the
other through a different angle: what can be ‘known’ about the other lies only in the
sensible; in other words, it cannot be known, but sensed – which fixes the real
meaning of the idea that is trying to be conveyed within an ambivalent grey zone.
which is itself extremely limited for the perceiver. Zebercet’s experience is somewhat
concealed yet disclosed, known and unknown at the same time. It can never be fully
understood by the reader; but at the same time she/he is constantly exposed to its
effects. The portrayal of Zebercet’s experience, therefore, pushes the conventional
understanding of representability through which only his physical reactions to his
surroundings are revealed. We, as readers, see his grabbing, pulling, caressing, and his
wandering fingers, but never receive a word that describes/represents his experience as
a whole. The limited exposure of Zebercet’s affective state, therefore, hinders the
reader from sympathizing with him. Although the information is given about
Zebercet’s demeanors, what is knowable about Zebercet’s experience is precluded.
The language here, then, delineates what is reachable from what is not.
The presentation of Zebercet’s contact with the cleaning lady’s body agrees with
Derrida’s argument in his reading of Jean-Luc Nancy regarding the nature of touch in
On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy (2005): he maintains that the experience of coming
into contact with the other through touching parallels, in some way, how concept of
law distinguishes what is allowed, touchable, contactable or knowable from all that is
not (Derrida, 2005, p. 66). Treating the act of touching and the law as concepts that set
boundaries, Derrida also implies that the experience of touching leads to an impossible
experience where its absolute laws or boundaries can no longer be determined (ibid.,
p. 111). Yüce Aydoğan’s in depth analysis of Anayurt Oteli is also helpful in
discussing the issue of touching as a limit-experience (Aydoğan, 2012). He states that
the possibility of touching does not seek the activeness of a physical body but the
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passivity of flesh being open to its outer impacts. In addition, he claims that this
infinite openness to the impacts of outer space determines the very power in
Zebercet’s mode of living. His physical responses to his surroundings never set any
closure, law, or boundary; but have always already ‘transgressed’ their possible limits
that were socially constructed from the very beginning (Foucault, 1977). As the limit
has been overruled from the very beginning, there can be no longer an absolute law to
be crossed. This common dilemma and thus, impossible experience of transgression
taking place in the act of touching, understanding or telling about the other poses here
the ethical concern of the novel about the ‘knowability’/reachability of the other.
Norms, laws and language set by the society Zebercet lives in, therefore, preclude his
openness to experience that is inherently lawless; and at the same time, the
conventional language instrumentalized by the narrator for telling Zebercet’s story is
violating his presence by setting reductionist boundaries to his experience. There are,
therefore, two layers of ethical stalemate concerning the position of the ‘other’ in
Anayurt Oteli, one of which is revealed in the story itself, and the other lies in the way
the story is told.
Through the way Zebercet’s story is told, we, as readers, confront the limits of
knowing him: what is knowable in his life is determined by the laws of representation
in language. Language, here, serves as the law that determines what could be told. The
position of the narrator in Anayurt Oteli, thus, problematizes the unity of stories that
are narrated to an assumed addressee in a comprehensive way. It problematizes the
conventional language to narrate the language that is expected to be rhetorical, in the
constant strive to make the story complete, coherent and persuasive to its audience.
Indicating the problematic characteristic of the rhetorical aspect of language in
Anayurt Oteli that violates Zebercet’s way of being while recounting, the narrator
tends to redefine his role by avoiding to tell the story of him on behalf of him in the
narrative. However, the communicative medium from which the narrator tries to avoid
this, also proceeds from the everyday conversations taking place between characters in
the narrative. How, then, is the narrative able to overcome the violating characteristic
of the everyday language? And especially, how can it escape the law of language that
usually puts the conversation to a closure through definitive judgments?
Law and Responsiveness: Undoing the Space of Rhetoric
As I have indicated in the previous section, the ethical problem of the language
concerning the representability of the other’s existence, not only lies in the narrator’s
discourse, but also prevails in the language used by Zebercet and his surroundings. In
this section, therefore, I will focus more on how the idiosyncratic speeches of
characters undo the premise of communication in the everyday use of language in the
narrative.
Zebercet’s long and inner monologues provide the reader with examples of how
the communicational aspect of language is overruled by Zebercet’s grammar-free,
irreconcilable and fragmented expressions. The excerpt below, considered as one of
the most remarkable, ‘striking, bloody, complex and at the same time one of the most
poetical imaginary revenge scenes in Turkish literature’ (Gürbilek, 2013, p. 151) is a
striking case in point. It presents Zebercet’s furious but silent reply to the insult of a
roasted chestnut seller, who scolded him by saying ‘Why are you standing there like a
lemon? Buzz off!’ (Atılgan, 2014, p. 83):
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A handful of sand might be thrown to the chestnuts we take the sand
from Pig River / you look like a pig / a donkey / an ox / a cow / a mule
/ a monkey / a bear / a hippopotamus / a cockroach / a rat / a dog / a
coyote / he strangled the coyote by jumping on it said his uncle he said
I won’t let my mare be eaten would he strangle it if they let him would
it be ever known would he be scared of facing the end … (ibid., p. 85)
Zebercet’s thinking process does not convey a direct message for the other party
to understand. It is a convoluted response that clearly does not seek a reaction; a
unique way of employing the language, which brings to the fore Zebercet’s personal
memories, such as the day his uncle tries to strangle a coyote. The singular
characteristic of his language underlines the singularity of his experience, and alludes
to the fact that any shared, cultural and communicative medium between the seller
and himself would eventually fail. In this scene, Zebercet remains particularly silent;
his expressions do not comply with the rules of propriety, and his sentences are not
constructed in a way that effortlessly articulates the intended meaning. His words,
therefore, stand for his unique existence – for his particular history, language, and
identity, which cannot be reduced to any form of common parlance.
The uniqueness of Zebercet’s expressions impresses upon the reader to
reevaluate and question the promises of communication during the process of reading
as well. Unlike carrying a rhetorical end that would eventually instruct its reader,
Anayurt Oteli places an ethical question around the act of reading itself, and suggests
alternative ways of ‘coming into contact’ with others. Before delving into this
particular issue, in this section I continue discussing the ethical position taken by the
novel through its particular uses of language. I will touch upon the problem of
rhetoric in the narrative, which causes the novel to take such a position in the first
place.
According to Aristotle, rhetoric is the art of persuasion through language that is
designed to have impact on a specific audience (Aristotle, n.d.; Cascardi, 2004, p.
307). As the purpose of rhetoric is to impress the other party during a conversation, it
brings about the use of particular techniques directing the addressee to agree on the
plausibleness of the proposed argument. Extracting an affirmative response from the
audience, therefore, becomes the primary objective of the speech. In this sense, the
conversation is one-sided; the rhetorician is not interested in getting to know about
the person/people he addresses. Stating ‘[n]ot every discourse is a relation with
exteriority,’ Levinas (2011, p. 70) emphasizes in his ethical theory that in the
rhetorical use of language, a genuine, metaphysical desire of self being open and nonjudgmental to the other’s differences, is lacking. On the contrary, rhetoric, he argues,
sets a barrier with the other, withholding one from giving any effort toward
recognizing the unique presence of the other party:
Rhetoric, absent from no discourse, and which philosophical discourse
seeks to overcome, resists discourse (or leads to it: pedagogy,
demagogy, psychagogy). It approaches the other not to face him, but
obliquely— not, to be sure, as a thing, since rhetoric remains
conversation, and across all its artifices goes unto the Other, solicits
his yes. But the specific nature of rhetoric (of propaganda, flattery,
diplomacy, etc.) consists in corrupting this freedom. It is for this that it
is preeminently violence, that is, injustice. (ibid.)
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Levinas argues that rhetoric operates within a kind of speech that is different
from a veritable conversation where the other’s singular, unique experience or
presence can be faced. Focusing strictly on soliciting ‘yes’ from the other, the nature
of the rhetoric does not extend to the interlocutors the possibility of sharing anything
subjective. In other words, rhetorical language corrupts and violates the other’s
freedom by reducing its experience to representable, plausible arguments that are
appropriate to its limited conversational arena. Therefore, it erases their personal
differences and does away with the possibility of engaging in a genuine, veritable
conversation. Under such conditions, as Levinas mentions, justice can only prevail by
‘overcoming of rhetoric’ where the other can be, though limitedly, accessed in its
own presence.
By problematizing and nullifying the rules and means of the everyday
conversation as in the example I have given above, therefore, Zebercet’s idiosyncratic
use of language empties the communicative premise of rhetoric in his setting. His
everyday environment becomes entirely a field for violence, as the law that governs
everyday life categorizes its subjectivities into well-defined groups, and does not
recognize anyone, who abides by its decrees, as anything else than a ‘citizen.’
Sentences or judgments, therefore, function within the rhetorical framework of both
legal discourse and everyday language, where the subjects can be thought as
‘knowable,’ and the daily communication can proceed comprehensively.
One of the most remarkable examples for the problematization of legal discourse
in Anayurt Oteli can be given from Zebercet’s attendance in trials. During his
continuous visits to the courthouse in order to follow a specific murder case, Zebercet
pretends to answer the questions in his mind as if the questions are directed to his
own killing of the cleaning woman:
- Doctor said she was truly a virgin. Her father told that he had not
even let a male fly perch on the girl. Why did you kill her?
‘His father you said his father had already died then they sent her
back because she was already touched, she was naked on the bed in
the small hours her eyes, mouth opened I pulled the quilt over her...’
(Atılgan, 1973, pp. 74-75)1
The question of ‘why’ here indicates the determination of the judge to elicit a
direct response from the accused. The appropriate answer to the question ‘Why did
you kill her?’ is normally expected to solve the case, and lead to a tribunal to a
discussion on what kind of punishment the person deserves in accordance with his
motive for murder. Any plausible reason would make sense within the socially agreed
rules of such conversation, as any answer would remain within its legitimate
boundaries. This question seeks a straight-forward answer, and does not concern
itself with finding out the singular, subjective experience of Zebercet as the other.
Zebercet’s reaction in response to this very question is not the answer one
anticipates; it does not really engage with the question, nor does it reveal the motive
behind the act of killing. Rather, his answer reveals his unique existence as the
‘other’: instead of confirming with the rules of legal discourse, and thus delivering a
statement that clearly answers the question, Zebercet’s response contains many
grammatical errors. By formulating his sentences in an unconventional way, he also
refuses to act in accordance with the communally-accepted laws of conversation.
Through his language, therefore, Zebercet cannot be recognized as a mere ‘criminal’
1
The translation is by Ezgi Ceylan.
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and cannot be reduced to a representable, knowable subject ‘in front of the law’; he
delineates an inevitable gap between his unreachable, unexplainable presence and the
legal formalities that constantly try to define him as an accused subject.
By analyzing Kafka’s parable ‘Before the Law’ (1978), Derrida mentions the
similarity between the impossibility of the idea of an absolute law and storytelling:
‘narrative accounts would try to approach the law and make it present, to enter into a
relation with it, indeed, to enter it and become intrinsic to it’ (Derrida, 1992, p. 191)
but in the end, it becomes an impossible act as every story is singular and irreducible
to language’s representativeness. Derrida argues that the story as well as its title
‘before the law’ presupposes a shared unity and meaning; however, it can never
surpass being merely ‘a title,’ (ibid., p. 188) being a fake indication hiding the
singularity of the story that is told. Let us recall the defendant’s recounting of the
murder case in Anayurt Oteli where telling becomes impossible ‘before the law’:
… in a while she shrilled I ran the door was open Fatma Kuruca
collapsed while crying the bride was lying on the bed inside naked her
face been crushed she was in blood her hair dispersed on the pillow her
chest was also bloody it was asked he said there was nothing in her
hands it was asked he said that he did not see the pitcher … (Atılgan,
2014, p. 72)
The revelation of the story’s singular, non-representable, and irreducible
violence is told in a machinated tone desensitizing the potential effects of the
narrative on its audience. The dead bride, lying on the bed in blood, is similar to the
defeated cock lying on the ground at the end of the fight whose experience is
impossible to be told. They are the voiceless others being present in these violent
scenes. They are voiceless, yet present: their existence cannot be ignored, though
impossible to be reached, known, or understood. The story told in the courthouse to
the typist hides what was really endured when the event took place, and the actual
pain is lost forever. Before the law, events are told in full detail where their
singularities are kept out.
The singularity of a story, however, is both contained and hidden within its
insufficient language. It can never be told, but it cannot be neglected either. The
story, whose law lies in its sentences, delineates both the possibility and impossibility
of telling about the singular experiences. Through its insufficient language, therefore,
Anayurt Oteli both enables and disables the reader’s access to the story of Zebercet
and other characters: It makes them appear, but at the same time it reduces their
presence to limited representations. What might the novel, then, ask its reader about
her/his limited understanding of the characters during the reading experience? What
possibilities could this ethical question about the representability of the other, bring
the reader? In the following section, I will shortly touch upon the ethical stance of
Anayurt Oteli by focusing on its aesthetic potential of moving its reader.
Ethical at the Outset: The Primacy of the Event
As I indicated at the beginning, the narrator of Anayurt Oteli never reveals to its
reader the determining causes of the events. The narrative tells the successive events
in short, and informative sentences, and it eliminates any connection to the prior
happenings in the story. As ‘The Second Coming,’ I argued that Anayurt Oteli breaks
the promise of a telos; an ultimate, binding purpose of the universe or a story that
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would constitute a whole. Events in the narrative appear as separated from each other
as taking place in a chaos where they have no beginning or end. The narrator
describes them as if they only occur as coincidences; they are not portrayed as a
result of another event, and therefore, they can only appear in their singularity.
Similar to the portrayal of characters as ‘singular’ others, the depiction of the events
also appear in the narrative as unique cases, which cannot be reduced to a rational
chain of causality.
Troubling the rational logic, the events told in the narrative, therefore, empty any
kind of expectation in the reading process as well. Random incidents appearing in the
course of the narrative do not allow the reader to ‘know,’ ‘understand,’ or even
‘speculate’ about what is going on; the events remain unreachable. The following
scene where Zebercet finds himself on the edge of an accident can illustrate this
randomness that, in turn, will contribute to the novel’s ethical position, as I will
explain later:
He trembled as he traversed with the packages in his hand. The car has
stopped just a bit further. The driver greeted with his head, smiling. He
smiled back; he said ‘I’m sorry.’ People passing by also were smiling.
He walked quickly. It was a sweet accident; but how easy it was for
one to die. (Atılgan, 2014, pp. 22-23)
The scene invalidates any possible scenario relevant to the course of events in
the plot. The accident comes to happen in an instant, without showing any ‘tangible’
causes, as Catherine Malabou argues in The Ontology of Accident (2012). Zebercet,
the driver and people in their surroundings all smile, while confronting this
unexpected happening. Their smiles indicate that they are in some way disturbed
facing this uncontrollability, and relieved by its instantaneous delay. This constant
potential for disaster in the narrative, demonstrates to the reader its insufficiency to
anticipate, or know.
The same pattern in the reading experience repeats itself when it comes to
characters. For example, as an ‘unexpected’ and ‘untimely’ baby, Zebercet’s coming
into the world is considered by his parents and neighbors as an accident. Or we, as
readers, for instance, are never informed when he decides to commit suicide; he
continues on doing his everyday habits: he gets up and dresses, makes the bed,
washes his face, and drinks tea before hanging himself (Atılgan, 2014, p. 105). The
demeanors of characters, such as the events, do not pertain to a hierarchical order in
terms of their assumed ‘significance.’ Every character appears in the novel, therefore,
as a potential, as a contingency; their actions are never presented by particular
reasons explaining their behaviors to some audience as a whole. They are singular
and equally present in their unique beings, and this constant lack of information about
them leads the reader to question its adequacy to know the other person.
By exposing the ethical problem in the understandability of the other, the novel
invites the reader to think further about their own relationships with their
surroundings. In line with the premise of the novel, as Derrida (1992) and others
(Blanchot, 1989; Altieri, 2003; Attridge, 2004; Clark, 2005) argue, literature becomes
a singular event that uniquely affects its reader to take ethical actions. It has a power
to establish a subjective effect on the side of its reader through its aesthetic impact
resulting from the particular uses of language. As I have argued before, just like the
portrayal of events and characters, the act of telling in Anayurt Oteli harbors a
potential: it both hides and reveals parts of events or experiences, with which the
reader can never fully come into contact. The limited visibility of the other prevails
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only from the distance the narrator maintains. Telling, therefore, becomes an essential
part of the ethical concern portrayed through the use of language in the novel. One of
the most remarkable examples of the distancing language of the narrator can be given
from the part where Zebercet meets Ekrem, the seventeen-year-old boy with whom
he engages for the first time a homoerotic experience in the movies:
He pulled out his cigarette box and asked. He doesn’t smoke. He
asked. His name was Ekrem. He lighted his cigarette upon his asking.
‘Ahmet’ he replied. He asked. He came from the village last year, he
used to work at an ironsmith’s shop at the industrial bazaar of the
town. His wage was low; yet he was learning the craft. He asked. He is
staying with his old, lonely aunt. … He was on his right side; his arm
touches him they settled. The boy said: ‘This cinema is the best one.’
He has some hair faintly visible on his upper lip, around the beard line
on his cheeks. He asked. He recently turned seventeen.
(Atılgan, 2014, pp. 50-51)1
The narrator focuses here merely on the actions and statements of Zebercet,
introducing himself as ‘Ahmet,’ and that of the young boy Ekrem. The conversation
is rendered in such a way that it displays the difference between what they experience
and what they say. The words they use never reflect their intense attraction; they
continue to speak on an ‘agreeable’ ground that would remain appropriate for their
surroundings such as asking about each other’s name, age, what they do, where they
come from, or just making comments like ‘this cinema is the best one.’ The questions
they pose to each other are presumable and expected – they are insignificant
compared to their actual experience of sexual attraction, therefore the narrator
reduces their questions to the same phrase ‘he asked,’ without giving their contents.
Their verbal distance, however, is crossed rather through a bodily language,
which could not be expressed by the rules of their formal communication. After the
conversation I quoted above, only some hints of their experience, though limited,
could be seized from the descriptions of their movements: the touch of their arms and
knees, the feeling of warmth in each other’s hands, Zebercet’s erection and the boy’s
instant snuggling during the film they watch is described in detail (Atılgan, 1973, p.
51). The gap between their genuine attractions and formal statements along with the
limited presentation of their affects to the reader entails the language’s inadequacy to
express or tell about the other’s experiences. Thus, by telling only about the said and
the performed, the narrator puts the characters into an unknown position for the
reader, and lets the reader question his/her own encounter with others both in fiction,
and in their everyday lives.
In conclusion, the rules of everyday language in Anayurt Oteli are transgressed,
and then nullified by the alternative uses of language. Especially the protagonist
Zebercet’s alienation from his surroundings through his miscommunication with
other characters, brings about his otherness, leading to his singular presence in the
novel from the very beginning. His presence creates a contradiction with the language
of the law making decisions about punishments, deliberately neglecting his and the
other’s existence by reducing them to its own rules. The everyday language is no
different from the legal one: it violates the other’s singular identity for the sake of
establishing a communicative agreement.
1
The translation is by Ezgi Ceylan.
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The sentence and its definitive judgments cannot hold in Anayurt Oteli because
of the possibility that is opened up by the expression of unique experiences of the
‘other’ in the language. The language violates the narrative from the beginning that
undoes the assumed unity and certainty of communication. By undoing the premises
of definitive sentences, Anayurt Oteli proposes to its reader an alternative way of
approaching others without judging them. The narrative ethically questions the very
idea of claiming to know about the other, and lays bare the everyday violence, taking
place within the communication itself.
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